Margaret von Trotta

Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942, during the Second World War. Her father, Alfred Roloff, was a prestigious painter and illustrator, while her mother, Elizabeth von Trotta, belonged to the nobility. With her he moved to Düsseldorf at the end of the war, being a girl. When she was barely 18 years old, she moved to Paris, where she shaped her artistic taste, while she collaborated in the works of other colleagues, such as experimental short films. She will study Germanic and Romance philology. She will begin to appreciate Ingmar Bergman ‘s cinema , and she sees that Alfred Hitchcock ‘s work is not reduced to pure entertainment, it is possible to authorship on celluloid, to express himself personally. She can also take the pulse of the incipient “nouvelle vague”.

She began her artistic career as a theater actress, and from there she moved to television and cinema, working under the orders of renowned directors of the New German Cinema, such as RW Fasbinder, in whose company she premiered God of the Plague , The Plague in 1970 and 1971. American soldier and Attention to that beloved whore . Other filmmakers under whom she works are Gustav Ehmck, Klaus Lemke, Herbert Achternbusch and Reinhard Hauff .

Her personal relationship will be especially important -she married him in 1971 after a previous marriage that ended in divorce, and they will remain together until 1991- and professional with Volker Schlöndorff , with whom, in addition to acting, she co-wrote the script for The Sudden Riches Kombach’s Poor (1971). She repeats the double role of actress and screenwriter with Schlöndorff in Fuego de paja (1972) and Tiro de grace (1976) . The artistic collaboration of wife and husband will take another step in Katharina Blum’s Lost Honor (1975), an adaptation of the novel by Heinrich Bölls where both share credits not only as co-writers, but also as co-directors. The only son of the director, Felix Moeller, born in his first marriage to Jürgen Moeller, will appear briefly in several of his films, to follow a career as a documentary filmmaker from 2003.

Von Trotta’s acting facet will decline from the moment she takes the helm alone as a director. She will become part of the New German Cinema movement in her own right, and more specifically of the group of directors that also includes Jutta Brückner , Heidi Genée, Jeanine Meerapfel, Ulrike Ottinger, Helma Sanders and Helke Sander, to address women’s issues and those related to women, in her case without the radical feminist militancy of the time; Rather than dedicating herself to propaganda and pamphlets, she opts to defend the female role in society with works, that is, her films. So his will be a humanist cinema, a social X-ray of the cinema of his time with female protagonists. As she has once said, her view of women is existential, not ideological.

The thing begins with The Second Awakening by Christa Klages (1977), co-written with Luisa Francia , which follows a woman who robs a bank to avoid the closure of a nursery set up by a parents’ cooperative; The contrast with two other women, a married friend and a bank employee, invites action, one must know how to take control of one’s existence to change things and make life worthwhile, without sterile resignations. According to the director, they were inspired by real events and carried out documentation work, a way of doing that von Trotta will repeat in later films.

With a more intimate tone is Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), which follows two sisters, where the older, dominant one cancels out the personality of the younger one. She assures the director that she was interested, more than the fraternal ties, “to show the dependency between two people”, although Richard Corliss, a Time critic, wanted to see a symbolism of the relationship between the two Germanys.

His consecration as a filmmaker comes with The German Sisters (1981), a Golden Lion in Venice, where he combines intimate drama with a political backdrop with original time jumps, as he follows the relationship of two sisters, daughters of a Lutheran pastor, one in imprisonment for belonging to the terrorist group Baader-Meinhof. This to continue painting his Germany in a “leady time”, an idea alluded to in the original title of the film, “Die bleierne Zeit” quoting a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin. It was his first collaboration with Barbara Sukowa , who will become his leading actress. with the madness of a woman(1983), her image as a director of women inserted in intense psychological dramas is consolidated, here through the friendship of two women, one with suicidal tendencies. And she works with one of the emblematic actresses of German cinema, Hanna Schygulla . The question of the relationship between sisters is also at the core of Love and Desires (1988), a co-production with Italy and France that adapts Anton Chekhov ‘s “Three Sisters” , with Fanny Ardant , Greta Scacchi and Valeria Golina playing fraternal ties. At this point the filmmaker’s “corpus” is compared to the work of Ingmar Bergman, and she herself will admit to having a debt of gratitude to the Swedish artist. She will expressly quote The seventh sealas an influence for Vision .

About the women she has portrayed on screen, von Trotta says: “I always feel attracted to a woman who has to fight for her own life and her own reality, who has to overcome a certain situation of confinement, to break free. This is perhaps the main theme of all my films”.

Rosa Luxemburg (1986) marks the first of von Trotta’s three biographical films, starring Barbara Sukowa –she will be awarded an award at Cannes for her performance–, although none is a typical biopic. It is a story of a strong woman, it follows the trajectory of the Jewish political activist close to communism, who lives in 1871 and 1919. In 2009 she will tell in Vision the life of Hildegard von Bingen, abbess in the Middle Ages, mystic, connoisseur of botany and its medicinal applications and author of musical works, which is part of the Catholic saints. While in 2012 the center of her attention is the philosopher Hanna Arendtin the homonymous film, in the years of the trial against the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, to reflect on intellectual honesty, the pressure of public opinion and the roots of evil in its most depraved levels.

After a somewhat gray Italian period, which included L’africana (1990) and Il lungo silenzo (1993), he returns with a German story, The Promise (1995) , the tensions between the West and the East in the 1960s. , who can count on the prospect that the wall has fallen. Then follow commissioned television works, with little diffusion outside the German borders. Thus until arriving at the magnificent La Calle de las Rosas (2003), where he began his collaboration with the screenwriter Pamela Katz , with an analysis of the German Nazi past, based on the story of a Jewish woman in the United States, who investigates the family past. The protagonist Katja Riemann would be awarded in Venice for her interpretation.

About Hildegard von Binden from Vision he commented that “I think he was aware of having a talent. She had a responsibility for her own creativity. To speak a bit in the Catholic tradition, for a moment: if God presents you with a challenge, you have a responsibility to face it. She felt that, which was not easy for a woman of her time.”

From Hanna Arendt , a project developed over several years, she was attracted in her own words by her condition as a thinker, “her famous statement ‘I want to understand’, this phrase is the one that best describes her. It is precisely her search to understand people and the world that attracted me to her. Like Arendt, I never wanted to judge, only to understand. In this film, for example, I want to understand what Hannah Arendt thought about totalitarianism and moral collapse in the last century, about self-determination and freedom of choice. Finally what she managed to communicate, about evil and about love.”